Death Rattle

By Julie Flynn Badal

Benjamin and I were still in the full blush of romance when I became pregnant. We’d been dating for five months.

I was 38 years old and had never been pregnant before. I didn’t think it would be that easy. I’d read I had a better chance of being struck by lightning.

New to New York City, I didn’t even have a primary care doctor, let alone an OB/Gyn. In a panic, I called Planned Parenthood and made an appointment. When the day came, I closed my eyes and touched my hand to my belly and kept it there. I wanted this child.

Yes, we’d been impulsive and careless. But I was in love with Benjamin.

We were married on a Friday afternoon in April. I was already eight months pregnant. We got a slice of Sicilian pizza and a Diet Coke in our Brooklyn neighborhood before walking across Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall. I wore a green coat with big Jackie O buttons and a lavender scarf that matched Benjamin's tie.

On the steps of the courthouse, I looked up at the sky. It was an overcast afternoon, but the promise of spring was in the air. We walked in Central Park and took pictures beside the cherry trees that had begun to bud. Bright crocuses bloomed along the path.

I was happy that day. It wasn’t what I’d imagined for myself. No satin dress or string quartet or sparkling wine. But I couldn’t afford to think about that. It was just the two of us and the baby. And I would make it work, so help me god.

Our parents  all sent us cards. I noticed Benjamin's mother wrote Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Badal on the envelope in neat cursive. I thought it was cute at the time, an old-fashioned touch. But in the years to come, she addressed all her envelopes to me in that way. My name was even absent from the envelopes that contained my birthday cards.

Benjamin’s family lineage can be traced back to ancient Assyria. His parents actually spoke Aramaic. It doesn’t really get any more Old World than that. The Assyrian civilization stretched across parts of modern-day Iran, Iraq and Syria. They tended that land long before the birth of Muhammad.

I never discovered what distinguished the Assyrian culture from other Middle Eastern traditions except that Assyrians were among the first converts to Christianity. Over the centuries, they resisted conversion to Islam. As a result, they were relegated to the margins of mainstream Muslim society and often targeted and terrorized by despots.

As a newlywed, I thought my life would become more vibrant standing beside the bright mosaic of Benjamin’s culture. I imagined sitting at his mother’s kitchen table drinking coffee that had been brewed in a copper pot. I was ready for the fresh olives, the hot pita, the saffron rice and pomegranates. I was ready to listen to 1,001 tales from the old country: stories of persecution, survival, exodus.

Before our daughter was born, Benjamin and I travelled to Chicago to meet his parents. His mother Dinah opened her hands to frame my pregnant belly. “Look at you,” she said. 

Benjamin’s father, Ashur, placed figs and fresh feta with sprigs of parsley on the dining room table. Dinah made her way over in her walker. She’d been disabled by MS for more than a decade.

At the table, Ashur was easy to talk to. He could strike up a conversation about anything: Al Jazeera, J. Crew, Obama’s cabinet picks, the films of Kiriostami or Jud Apatow.

We were off to a good start.

During dinner, Dinah slid a small gift over to me. It was wrapped in newspaper. I imagined it was a piece of treasured jewelry from Iraq, earrings made of hammered bronze or blue agate on a silver chain. I unfolded the newsprint with care to find a ceramic squirrel that she had fished from the glass case of her china hutch.

The squirrel made me realize  the extent to which I’d fetishized Benjamin’s heritage. His mom didn’t drink mint tea, or wear jangly jewelry, or paint her eyes like an Egyptian cat. She drank Sanka all day and ate dry cookies from Sara Lee. Dinah didn’t want to discuss the plight of the Palestinians, or poems by Sufis. She mostly smoked and played Scrabble with her sisters while they watched Fox News or Jeopardy on the little television in her kitchen.

Benjamin's father, on the other hand, always prided himself on being a Renaissance Man. His family hailed from Tehran and had attended the University. They were well-versed in politics and spoke multiple languages. Dinah was from another world altogether. Her family had been shepherds for centuries in the hinterlands of Iraq. They were tribal people really, slow moving and weathered by the elements. Essentially hillbillies, Ashur said.

They met in Lincoln Park in Chicago  — at some kind of cotillion for young people in the Assyrian community. Ashur had had eyes for Dinah’s best friend, who was stunning. But she turned him down when he asked her to dance. So then he asked Dinah.

As it turned out, the differences between Dinah and Ashur were not complementary. The couple was always at odds. Ashur rolled his eyes at Dinah for being crass and clannish, content to waste her days smoking with her sisters. Dinah thought Ashur acted like a know-it-all, always correcting her wrong views on the world as if he had some blasted corner on the truth.

They made one another extremely unhappy. But they trudged on like that through the decades, unable to find their way through the blizzard of resentment.

My first daughter was two months old when Benjamin’s father was diagnosed with lung cancer. Ashur hadn’t wanted to tell us with all we had going on, but it was becoming more difficult to hide. The cancer had metastasized in his bones. Every move he made was agony.

There was an unspoken consensus that Ashur’s cancer came from the second-hand smoke of the never-ending chain of his wife’s cigarettes. No one would come out and say it. It was only suggested. The sideways glances and knowing nods and quick raises of the eyebrow. It all somehow felt worse than words.

Ashur passed away in January, six months after his diagnosis. We buried him in the frozen ground of a family plot, next to the graves of his parents and his baby son, Adam, who had died of crib death when Benjamin was a toddler.

It was almost too much to witness Ashur’s coffin lowered into the earth next to his son’s headstone. The baby’s name was carved into it and below it a single year: 1973.

Dinah never really recovered from losing her child. No one could mention the baby’s name without her falling apart.

After Ashur died, Dinah didn’t see the point in trying to stay alive anymore. She smoked all day and ate fried bologna sandwiches. She went from a walker to a wheelchair. The beige carpets in her condo were stained with grease from the wheels of her chair taking the same path every morning from her bed to the bathroom to the breakfast table. She went back the same way every evening.

With every visit, we’d find her a little more slumped or scabbed or bloated or blind. I did my best to play the role of the good daughter-in-law. I sat at the kitchen table and listened to her complaints and ignored the barbs while my daughters picked stale M&Ms out of her crystal candy bowl in the living room.

I sent cards on her birthday and preschool pictures of my girls in pretty frames. Baskets of fruit and cheese on Christmas and spring bouquets on Mother’s Day. I called her once a week and listened to stories about people I didn’t know.

It was hard for me to maintain much compassion for Dinah when I started clashing antlers with her son. Benjamin’s career had eclipsed our relationship and I was left to raise our two daughters on my own. We argued over everything and nothing — an unmade bed, a broken glass in the dishwasher, whose turn it was to attend the parent-teacher conference.

When we separated, my calls to Dinah became less frequent.

She hadn't been the mother-in-law I’d hoped for. My relationship with my own mother was strained and I would have given my left hand for a little maternal love. But Dinah had a stockpile of her own unmet needs, which left her jaded. She was the antithesis of openness, making it hard to understand what she wanted or required.

Three months before the pandemic hit, her nurse called to tell me Dinah began refusing food. I took this as a sign and booked plane tickets to Chicago. When we arrived, we didn’t find Dinah at her usual station at the breakfast table. She’d taken to a hospital bed in her room. Oxygen tubes plugged each nostril.

My daughters stepped into the room gingerly as if the ground were made of sugar glass. They sat in two chairs in front of the bed, their hands folded in their laps like this was church. They stared blankly at their grandmother, who no longer looked like herself, having lost so much weight and most of her hair.

By March, in the outermost reaches of winter, my mother-in-law’s death rattle began to sound. At the time, the entire country was locked down because of the pandemic. Her nurse held the phone to Dinah’s mouth and I listened to her breathe. It was the sound of someone leaving for good.

When I hung up the phone, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. There was nowhere to go in lockdown. My own daughters were sitting on their beds listening to their teachers through the computers on their laps. I looked out the window. The ground was still frozen, but the branches of the bare trees reached for me like arms.

Dinah died the following Wednesday. I said goodbye on Facetime before she returned home to the universe. I let the tears run down my face as I gazed into the blue light of the screen. Her hazel eyes blazed when she recognized me. It was as if someone had torn the covers off her heart. Love was leaking out everywhere.

“Look at you,” she said, as if I were a new baby in her arms.